Sixteen Kingdoms

The Sixteen Kingdoms, less commonly the Sixteen States, was a period in Chinese history from 304 to 439 in which the political order of northern China fractured into a series of short-lived sovereign states, most of which were founded by ethnic minority peoples who had settled in northern China during the preceding centuries and participated in the overthrow of the Western Jin Dynasty in the early 4th century. The period ended with the unification of northern China by the Northern Wei in the early 5th century.